To The Working-Classes of Great-Britain

Working Men!

To you I dedicate a work, in which I have tried to lay before my German
Countrymen a faithful picture of your condition, of your sufferings and
struggles, of your hopes and prospects. I have lived long enough amidst you to
know something about your circumstances; I have devoted to their knowledge my
most serious attention, I have studied the various official and non-official
documents as far as I was able to get hold of them -- I have not been satisfied
with this, I wanted more than a mere abstract knowledge of my subject, I wanted
to see you in your own homes, to observe you in your everyday life, to chat
with you on your condition and grievances, to witness your struggles against
the social and political power of your oppressors. I have done so: I forsook
the company and the dinner-parties, the port-wine and champagne of the
middle-classes, and devoted my leisure-hours almost exclusively to the
intercourse with plain Working-Men; I am both glad and proud of having done so.
Glad, because thus I was induced to spend many a happy hour in obtaining a
knowledge of the realities of life -- many an hour, which else would have been
wasted in fashionable talk and tiresome etiquette; proud, because thus I got an
opportunity of doing justice to an oppressed and calumniated class of men who
with all their faults and under all the disadvantages of their situation, yet
command the respect of every one but an English money-monger; proud, too,
because thus I was placed in a position to save the English people from the
growing contempt which on the Continent has been the necessary consequence of
the brutally selfish policy and general behaviour of your ruling
middle-class.

Having, at the same time, ample opportunity to watch the middle-classes,
your opponents, I soon came to the conclusion that you are right, perfectly
right in expecting no support whatever from them. Their interest is
diametrically opposed to yours, though they always will try to maintain the
contrary and to make you believe in their most hearty sympathy with your fates.
Their doings give them the lie. I hope to have collected more than sufficient
evidence of the fact, that -- be their words what they please -- the
middle-classes intend in reality nothing else but to enrich themselves by your
labour while they can sell its produce, and to abandon you to starvation as
soon as they cannot make a profit by this indirect trade in human flesh. What
have they done to prove their professed goodwill towards you? Have they ever
paid any serious attention to your grievances? Have they done more than paying
the expenses of half-a-dozen commissions of inquiry, whose voluminous reports
are damned to everlasting slumber among heaps of waste paper on the shelves of
the Home Office? Have they even done as much as to compile from those rotting
blue-books a single readable book from which everybody might easily get some
information on the condition of the great majority of "free-born Britons"? Not
they indeed, those are things they do not like to speak of -- they have left it
to a foreigner to inform the civilised world of the degrading situation you
have to live in.

A foreigner to them, not to you, I hope. Though my English
may not be pure, yet, I hope, you will find it plain English. No
workingman in England -- nor in France either, by-the-by -- ever treated me as
a foreigner. With the greatest pleasure I observed you to be free from that
blasting curse, national prejudice and national pride, which after all means
nothing but wholesale selfishness -- I observed you to sympathise with
every one who earnestly applies his powers to human progress -- may he be an
Englishman or not -- to admire every thing great and good, whether nursed on
your native soil or not -- I found you to be more than mere
Englishmen, members of a single, isolated nation, I found you to be
Men, members of the great and universal family of Mankind, who know their
interest and that of all the human race to be the same. And as such, as members
of this Family of "One and Indivisible" Mankind, as Human Beings in the most
emphatical meaning of the word, as such I, and many others on the Continent,
hail your progress in every direction and wish you speedy success.

Go on then, as you have done hitherto. Much remains to be undergone; be
firm, be undaunted -- your success is certain, and no step you will have to
take in your onward march will be lost to our common cause, the cause of
Humanity!